‘Miss! Come in and meet my granny!’ The in­vi­ta­tion came some twenty years ago from a smi­ley young man who had spot­ted me tramp­ing along a dirt road in the ob­scure south-east­ern In­done­sian is­land of Sumba. It was skil­let hot and ash­tray dusty, and I was very thirsty. His granny prob­a­bly had tales to tell, and she’d cer­tainly be good for a glass of tea or two. Why not? I had clam­bered up a lad­der onto a bam­boo ve­randa where other young­sters were mak­ing un­rest­ful noises with gongs and drums, then ducked through the low door­way and blinked into a win­dow­less dark­ness. Even­tu­ally, by the tiny grains of light that sprin­kled through the bam­boo-weave of the walls, I made out a poster of Je­sus and the Sa­cred Heart. There was a bag of dirty laun­dry on a bam­boo chair. But the room was oth­er­wise de­serted; no sign of granny.
‘Just a sec­ond!’ The young man fid­dled around with the laun­dry bag, un­ty­ing it and peel­ing back the nap­kin on top to re­veal Granny. She had died the pre­vi­ous day, and would be re­ceiv­ing guests each day un­til her fu­neral four days later, as was the lo­cal cus­tom. ‘It’s an hon­our for her to meet you,’ he said. And we sat and drank tea.

Bodomaroto

Twenty years af­ter tak­ing tea with a dead grand­mother, I dumped my bags in a dispir­it­ing ho­tel room, asked the staff to sweep away the dead cock­roaches and set out to ex­plore…
 
[…] The first vil­lage I spot­ted was Tarung. From the road, all I could see was a bit of thatch, a few pointy roofs tee­ter­ing above a patch of jun­gle. As I scram­bled up a rocky path to­wards the vil­lage, the scraps of thatch re­solved them­selves into a group of bam­boo houses built on thick wooden stilts. Each one had two doors open­ing on to a wide bam­boo ve­randa, and each was dwarfed by its roof, which started broad and low over the ve­randa, sloped gen­tly up to­wards the cen­tre of the house, then nar­rowed and shot high into the air. It made me think of a child wear­ing a dunce’s cap jammed down over a thick fringe. I kept climb­ing, weav­ing past run­away chick­ens, piglets and chil­dren, and emerged sud­denly into the cen­tre of the vil­lage. A ring of houses dec­o­rated with the skulls of long-dead buf­falo stood guard over a large oval clear­ing stud­ded with me­galithic tombs. On the carved top of one tomb, a fire raged. At its cen­tre was some kind of an­i­mal.
 Eliz­a­beth Pisani, In­done­sia Etc.